03/31/73 War Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo, NY
Eric;
A long time ago, inside a hockey rink in Buffalo....my first show:
Saturday, March 31st, 1973
End of March in western New York is early spring pretending to be
late winter. Gray, bleak- perfect time for a hit of the Dead!
The previous November I had started my first job- having turned 16
the month before. I was washing dishes in a steakhouse after school and
on the weekends. The head cook there was a 30- year-old Deadhead. I
liked him and as we started to get to know each other he 'went to work'
on me. A broken turntable at his house meant his records were very
loanable. He turned me on to Europe '72 (essentially just released- a
triple album seemed so bizarre then), Live Dead and the Skull and Roses
album. And a 'bootleg' 8-track tape. (The modern miracle of Deadbase has
allowed me with utter certainty to peg that show as the Fox Theatre in
St. Louis in December of 1971! The one broadcast over the FM where Pig
sang Run Rudolf Run. At one point Jerry boisterously complained between
songs about some house lights that were bothering him if memory serves
at all any more....)
I found most of their music so strange. It didn't sound much like the
Rolling Stones, or at all; they were my idea of a kick-ass rock band at
the time. (Could anyone be cooler than Keith Richards?). But I liked
this guy so much I hung in there and really tried to see what he saw, or
heard I guess I should say, in the music. Soon I was reading Garcia
interviews (my new friend thought he was very "aware") and before long
the news was out: the Dead were swinging through western New York at the
end March!
The bummer was this: they were playing where we all lived -Rochester-
on a Friday night, which was the biggest night of the week at this
restaurant. I might have been expendable but not this guy, so going to
that show was out of the question. Soon the plan was to catch them in
Buffalo the next night! Selling my parents on letting me go to Buffalo
with this guy they'd never met- to see the Grateful Dead- was the next
obstacle, and a big one, but eventually it was cleared (not so the
following July when the proposition was the same but this time to
Watkins Glen!).
So several of us from the restaurant went to meet this guy in
downtown Rochester on Saturday afternoon, 3.31.73, for our quick trip
over to Buffalo to see the Dead. It was my first rock concert. I was
very excited. At his place we encountered this enormous group of people
celebrating, getting psyched to see the fellows; a very festive and
energetic scene. At sixteen, raw and impressionable, there was so much
going on at this place I could hardly stand it. Beautiful women, not
girls like I was used to seeing at my high school, but gorgeous women.
One with red hair that may have gone down to her knees. A TV had a
heavyweight fight on; this was the afternoon Ken Norton broke Muhammed
Ali's jaw. News of that quickly spread through the assembled crowd- it
really was shocking. Ali was close to invincible during that time, or so
we thought.
Soon we were off to Buffalo. The unrelenting gray skies day didn't
seem to matter much as there was so much excitement. Tickets were $5.
When we got there we found ourselves inside just another municipal,
multi-purpose auditorium. (I would return for a circus a few months
later with my sister who was living in Buffalo at the time). A
distinctive mustard yellow paint was over much of the inside. But the
people in the place this night! Whew. All normalcy ended with the
architectural considerations. This was not yer usual sampling of the
population I need to tell no one! Hair, clothes, painted faces,
aromatic herbs, ...we weren't in Rochester any more and I wasn't too
clear if we were still in Buffalo once inside the Aud.
My memory all these years has told me the New Riders opened this show
but all sources suggest this kind of double bill hadn't happened since
about the Europe tour the previous spring. I've just been wrong, I
guess. We were aware that Pig had died earlier in the month, and I
remember feeling that night the He's Gone sounded especially soulful.
More inspired than the version I was used to off the live album.
Truckin' has the line about Buffalo and I clearly remember the crowd
reacting strongly when it came around. Both these recollections were
fully verified when, 21-1/2 years later, very gratifyingly, a fifty
minute recording of the remarkable He's Gone> Truckin'> Nobody's Fault
jam> drum solo> The Other One jam> Spanish jam> The Other One> jam> I
Know You Rider sequence was broadcast on the Grateful Dead Hour radio
program. Listening to the way He's Gone morphs into Truckin' still makes
the hair on the back of my neck stand up every time I give it a listen.
These guys were so different than the predominant rock act of the
day. Here they were on stage in jeans and T-shirts for god's sake. None
of that curious uni-sex stuff that was going on then- make-up,
hairstyles, jumpsuits. Glam-rockers these guys were not. They didn't
jump around, didn't stuff things down their pants, etc. They were
servants, tending the music. Imagine. They couldn't do a lot of that
other stuff even if they wanted as they were too busy listening to what
everybody else was doing and trying to figure out how they fit into that
nights milieu. Imagine. My overriding memory all these years was the
sort of stoic stage presence they maintained throughout the show. As the
student music critic for my high school paper so lucidly illuminated
(sarcasm) in his review ripping the Rochester appearance, "They just
stood there!" Indeed, their physical movement while playing was so
minimal that it was the one thing they did do- so small and
insignificant- that is my clearest memory all these years: Bob and
Jerry in particular would, over the course of the evening, with stunning
unmindfulness, flex one leg or the other while jamming by slowly lifting
their foot, as in an attempt to touch their heel to the back of their
knee. As if the intensely cerebral act of publicly composing music from
one moment to the next with five other individuals still allowed for
physical needs and remedies.
As the car eased out of the parking lot and headed back to Rochester
after the show, we dialed in a version of 'Playing in the Band' being
broadcast over a local radio station. A speaker in the back of the car
was close to my ear. This must have been the version on Ace. It sounded
magical, like if heaven has music it might sound like this, at least
once in awhile. I began, after seeing them that night, to really embrace
what it was they were up to. They were rebels, even within the already
'outlaw' realm of rock and roll. Misfits with a twist (high IQ's). This
appealed mightily to my adolescent sensibilities of that time.
Over the next several years, my appreciation for the music -in and of
itself- evolved to a remarkable extent, ensuring my interest in the band
had a safe passage to adulthood and beyond, through all these years. I
live in the West now, and haven't been back to western New York in
almost twenty years. I'm aware the Aud is no longer home to the Sabres
hockey team, but don't know if it is still in use or even standing as I
write this. But I do know on a gloomy night in March of 1973 it was a
cool place to be.
From: Daniel Fuller "dfuller@ontariosd.k12.or.us"
(
geocities.com/sunsetstrip/gala) (
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